Background

How Dinkum Assorted reached the stage

I wrote Dinkum Assorted because I was dissatisfied with feminist theatre of the mid 1980s.

It seemed overly-earnest, predictable and solemn. I wanted to write a big wild comedy piece that featured song and dance as well as issues like freedom. I have written a more detailed account of my intentions in writing the play in the Author’s Note in the Currency Press edition of the text

Workshopping

The first draft was workshopped in Sydney in the first Playworks Workshop, Playworks being an organisation set up to develop the work of Australian women playwrights. In this version of the play, there was one man, the works supervisor, played by Peter Carroll. I took out this character because I felt the dynamic of an all-female group would be more interesting.

Sydney Theatre Company then expressed an interest in the play, so I left the Playworks development scheme and started working on it on my own. I had a lot of encouragement and feedback at this time from Wayne Harrison, then dramaturg at the Sydney Theatre Company.

Wayne read drafts and accompanied me on a trip to Arnott’s Biscuit Factory in Sydney to see how biscuits were made, so that all the material in the play about biscuit manufacture would be accurate. Arnott’s were very helpful, indeed, in the final event they donated a large sum to staging the first production.

Later productions around the country also approached Arnott’s for publicity material and Arnott’s to their great credit, came to the party with great tolerance and good humour. Because the play was extremely complex to write and I was simultaneously trying to write for TV and raise my then two young children, I decided to try and get funding.

I was awarded a fellowship by the Australia Council and was also given the NSW Women and Arts Fellowship to finish Dinkum. It was at this stage that I removed from the play a character who was starting to pull too much focus and gave her her own play. She was a Eastern European Jewish immigrant called Reginka, and the play I gave her is Reginka’s Lesson, which later won the Sydney Theatre Company Short Play Prize and the Elizabethan Theatre Trust Biennial Play Award.

The Assorted evolves

Reginka was replaced by CONNIE, an English immigrant.
When the play was in a reasonably well-developed draft I submitted it to the Australian National Playwrights’ Conference, which workshopped it at their annual conference in Canberra 1987 After the play was read, the director, called down all of the women in the audience to stand on stage and take a bow with the cast.

Following the ANPC workshop, I had a meeting with Richard Wherrett, then heading the Sydney Theatre Company. He urged me to write the play with a cast of fifteen, even though he couldn’t, of course promise an STC production. But in the event, with great courage the play was eventually staged in 1988 as a joint production between Sydney Theatre Company and Melbourne Theatre Company.

It was an immediate success. Since then it is almost constantly in production somewhere around Australia by amateurs and professionals and is often on the drama syllabus for schools.

1. Discuss the comic and serious studies of the notion of freedom in Dinkum Assorted
   
2. Discuss the treatment of men in Dinkum Assorted
   
3. Unravel the various plots of Dinkum Assorted and analyse how the author progresses the plot in each scene in which the characters and plot appear.

Find examples in the play of the transmission of

1. exposition (the transmission of crucial plot information), particularly backstory (a form of exposition, namely, what happened before the play started);
   
2. subtext (information being transmitted between the characters despite of or in addition to their words)

For information about dialogue see Linda Aronson Screenwriting Updated:New and Conventional Ways of Writing for the Screen (aka Scriptwriting Updated:New and Conventional Ways of Writing for the Screen)

Practical Drama Exercises

1. Create a scene involving two of your favourite characters from Dinkum Assorted. Be sure that you use their idiolect (individual way of speaking).
   
2. Create the scene in which Milly first speaks to her mother-in-law ( a character who is not in the play) about her latest pregnancy.
   
3. Create a scene between Joan and her lover.
   
4. Create a scene between Rosie and her US airman boyfriend
   
5. Create a scene showing Rosie and Vi at a party full of US airmen (the men may actually talk, or the scene may be created with dialogue only for Rosie and Vi)